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Censoring the Past

There is no room on TV for racial abuse but beware the rewriting of history

Memory plays tricks, history does not. There is an older generation of British television viewers who remember, perhaps with undue affection, the sitcoms of the 1970s in which class and ethnic prejudices were challenged and mocked. Seen today on nostalgia channels, episodes of Till Death Us Do Part and Love Thy Neighbour are neither particularly amusing nor trenchant in their social criticism. Their value lies rather in presenting an era when television was trying to get to grips with postwar Britain, a country that was becoming more open to the world and at the same time more anxious about immigration.

Ofcom, the communications regulator, should think twice about applying contemporary standards of political correctness to output from those days. One of Ofcom’s tasks is to…

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